05 Oct 2012
Exciting Glyndebourne 2013 season
Exciting developments at Glyndebourne ! Many new initiatives which could transform Glyndebourne from a summer festival to a truly international, year-round opera experience.
Rossini’s La donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House boasts a superstar cast. Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez are perhaps the best in these roles in the business at this time. Yet the conductor Michele Mariotti is also hot news.
It would seem a logical step for the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey to take on the role of the Composer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.
“Aim for excellence”, says Douglas Boyd, new Artistic Director of Garsington Opera at Wormsley, “and the audience will follow you”.
When I spoke with Zandra Rhodes, she was in her large San Diego workspace, which she described as having walls decorated with her own huge black and white drawings.
Palm Beach audiences are famous for their glamour, but in recent years a special star has sparkled amid the jewels, sequins, feathers and furs (whatever the weather).
When the soprano Jessica Pratt first arrived in Italy, she had yet to learn the language or sing in a staged opera.
On Wednesday evening, February 20, Los Angeles Opera gave a press conference at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion featuring Music Director James Conlon.
It is another “What Could Have Been” moment. The debut of Brokeback Mountain by Charles Wuorinen is part of Madridʼs Teatro Real coming season.
Plans for July’s Aix-en-Provence Festival were announced and opera is, of course, at the center of the program with a particularly noteworthy Richard Strauss production.
Amsterdam enjoys a rare visit from Moscow’s Stanislavski Opera at the landmark Koninklijk Carre Theater, for three performances of Tchaikovski’s Eugene Onegin and a Sunday morning opera concert, on February 1st-3rd.
A new festival hall has been inaugurated in the small town of Erl in the Tyrolean mountains.
Yesterday, Conductor Riccardo Muti opened the Rome Opera, where he is “honorary conductor for life,” with a gala presentation of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.
When tenor Michael Spyres takes the stage at Carnegie Hall on December 5th, he will be in heady company.
One of the most noteworthy and controversial productions in recent memory arrived in Belgium with hurricane force as Director Terry Gilliam’s inaugural opera, an inspired interpretation of Hector Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust, blasted into Ghent, followed by a run in Antwerp.
Florian Boesch is singing Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin at the Oxford Lieder Festival on Sunday 14th October. This won’t be routine. Radically challenging conventional interpretation, Boesch says “I don’t believe it ends in suicide”
Exciting developments at Glyndebourne ! Many new initiatives which could transform Glyndebourne from a summer festival to a truly international, year-round opera experience.
The recently released numbers for the past season at Barcelona’s opera Liceu gives some hope for the future.
A record 278,978 people attended events of the 2012 edition of the famed Salzburg Festival in Austria, the largest number since its founding 92 years ago.
Just after things were settling after the scandal of baritone Evgeny Nitikin supposed swastika tattoo at the Bayreuth Festival, another one seems likely to take its place.
Three quarters of the way through this discussion, a question that inhabits the mind of anyone putting any thought to the subject — but no one dare ask — was rhetoricised, “what is opera?”
Exciting developments at Glyndebourne ! Many new initiatives which could transform Glyndebourne from a summer festival to a truly international, year-round opera experience.
But first, details of the 2013 season. A new production of Rameau Hippolyte et Aricie, a first for Glyndebourne and relatively rare in live performance. This is big news because it will be conducted by William Christie who does Rameau with more élan than anyone else. If anything, this could outshine the famed Glyndebourne Purcell The Fairy Queen. (reviewed here) Rameau is even more extravagantly baroque than Purcell, and, of course, is associated with dance more than any other composer before Stravinsky. Imagine the possibilties ! Christie is joined again by director Jonathan Kent and designer Paul Brown, so they should be able to come up once more with something spectacular. Sarah Connolly will sing the role of Phèdre. No doubt, this will be a highlight of the whole 2013 year.
The other new production for 2013 will be Richard Strauss Ariadne auf Naxos. Vladimir Jurowski is standing down as Glyndebourne's Music Director after 13 years, but there'll be another chance to hear him there in a special Celebration Concert, where he'll conduct a dramatic realization of Benjamin Britten's Canticles,.Jurowski's legacy will be marked by the release of four of his performances on the Glyndebourne label - La Cenerentola, Love and Other Demons (Eötvös), Tristan und Isolde, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (reviewed here)
Not quite a revival, not quite a new poroduction : Donizetti Don Pasquale. This hasn't been seen in the main Festival but was very well recieved diuring the 2011 Glyndebourne Touring Opera season. This time, Danielle de Neise will be singing Norina. Marking the Britten and Verdi anniversaries, Glyndebourne will revive the Michael Grandage Billy Budd (Padmore instead of Imbrailo) and Richard Jones' acclaimed Falstaff. Le nozze di Figaro sold so well in 2012, that it will be back next year, too.
Glyndebourne's Sussex summer season is unique, but its magic can be enjoyed all year round. The 2012 Touring season runs until 8th December and reaches eight British towns. The operas this year are Rusalka, Le nozze di Figaro and The Yellow Sofa, by Julian Phillips, Glyndebourne's Composer-in Residence. This year there will also be extra cinema screenings of the David McVicar Handel Guilio Cesare.. Glyndebourne Touring Opera doesn't merely replicate the main Festival but offers its own specialities, as the hit Don Pasquale proved. The big draw in 2013 will be Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, recieving its receives its first Glyndebourne staging since its 1946 premiere with Kathleen Ferrier and Peter Pears, who will be a hard act to follow. Also touring next year will be L'elisr d'amore, Hansel und Gretel and a new commission, Captain Blood's Revenge, aimed at schools and families, an important facet of Glyndebourne's outreach programme.
Glyndebourne also reaches out internationally. New for 2013 is a Digital Festival where all six Festival operas will be broadcast in cinemas and online, worldwide, through a combination of live and recorded-live transmissions. Picturehouse Entertainment will be screening Glyndebourne productions next summer in over 100 UK cinemas. As a special seasonal treat, the Guardian will also stream the 2007 production of Tristan und Isolde (Bělohlávek, Stemme, Gambrill, Pape) from 26/12/12 to 6/1/13. What's more, Glyndebourne's own recording label is now making its entire catalogue available for digital download, with new releases like The Cunning Little Vixen (reviewed here) and the Ravel double bill L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges, (reviewed here)
Anne Ozorio